A couple of things fit together from recent reading. Through the Financial Times I have found a research project into Second Life funded by IBM. There is a company website for www.seriosity.com, linked to research by Byron Reeves at Stanford and Thomas Malone at MIT. There is evidence of leadership development through online games, refencing a leadership model developed at MIT. I have now found three PDF files about this and they make a lot of sense.

Then earlier today I caught up with Buzzmachine, the blog from Jeff Jarvis. He mostly writes about media as changing with the web , but occasionally mentions education. He expacts a similar scale of change at some point to what he observes in news organisations. The universities he mentions as having content online already are Stanford and MIT. In the UK there is often mention of research and teaching universities as if there is a need to concentrate on a small number of research brands. As the effect of the web speeds up I am not sure why any research universities would be in the UK in terms of destination sites. It seems to me that the universities where there is most interest in the web are not the same ones that get research funding. Bit sweeping but something to come back to.